In addition to being a City Mouse / Country Mouse couple, Farmer Gary and I are also polar opposites when it comes to air temperature.

“Is it cold in here?” I ask him from October to May. His reply is always a slight shrug and “it feels fine to me.”

Well. The other day, I decided to press the issue. With my chilled foot hovering over a floor vent, I declared the air coming through was not in the least bit warm.

After patiently explaining to me (again) that the furnace was not forced-air, but that the warmth would drift economically forth, gently, so that you hardly noticed it, Gary agreed to check the furnace.

Then he called a repairman.

Indeed, the fan was working, but the heater part wasn’t engaged.

The overnight low had dipped to five degrees.

Although this is the primary heat source for the back-half of our house, the sunroom has a mini-split, so we didn’t freeze.

The repairman replaced a part, to no avail. Then he suggested they go outside. No, not to engage in fisticuffs; he wanted to check something.

They quickly found the problem.

The air-intake vent outside was blocked. Apparently, a mommy mud dauber had declared it the perfect spot to build her nest. And then another. And another. The two-inch-in-diameter vent was jam-packed with mud-dauber nests, with no room for air to be drawn into the furnace for heating.

The repairman didn’t take long to break them loose, all the while filling Gary’s head with stories of other items he’d unjammed from pipes over the years. Back inside, he reinstalled the still-functioning warming device and headed on his merry way.

We now think it’s been a year or more since the pipe jammed, judging by my shivering and whining.

All these years living here on the farm, I’ve had nothing bad to say about daubers.

Pam Dawber, after all, made a wonderful foil as Mindy to Robin Williams’ Mork. And then there’s Dauber on the TV show Coach, Bill Fagerbakke, who went on to voice Patrick Star on SpongeBob SquarePants.

As I learn more about mud daubers, though, my shivering returns.

They are a type of wasp. When it’s time to procreate, mama builds a nest out of mud. (“Like concrete,” advises Gary. “Only harder.”) Often, you’ll see the tubes attached to the eaves of your house, or in your garage. Next, she stings a spider to paralyze it, attaches an egg to it, then packs them away in the mud nest, with an extra spider or two, in case baby is born hungry.

And why shouldn’t the babies be hungry? From the looks of things, they spent the winter in a cannoli shell, just waiting for the sweet, creamy cheese filling!

Chances are, the nests the repairman removed yesterday were long-ago abandoned. Other sting-y flying things, though, have been known to move in when they see an empty pre-fab.

Now we know to check the furnace air-intake pipe periodically.

This morning, our house had nary a chill. In fact, it felt so good I greeted my long-suffering husband with: Gosh, the house is awfully warm. Is there anything you can do about that?

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